Improbable Research

Here are a few of the more than 85,000 (or perhaps more than 200,000) books authored by Professor Philip M. Parker and his book-writing machine.

?The Official Patient?s Sourcebook on SPASMODIC DYSPHONIA ?The Official Patient?s Sourcebook on DIARRHEA ?FLATULENCE: A Bibliography, Medical Dictionary, and Annotated Research Guide to Internet References HALITOSIS: A Bibliography, Medical Dictionary, and Annotated Research Guide to Internet References

(That’s an excerpt from the article “May We Recommend: Parker Titles,” Published in AIR 14:2.)

Megan McCullen has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I am doing my dissertation research on the archaeology and ethnohistory of migration and community identity. On archaeological digs, and in daily life, I’m known for wearing bandanas to keep my luxuriant flowing hair out of my eyes. I hope to follow in the footsteps of the great anthropologist and recent LFHCfS inductee Margaret Mead.

Megan M. McCullen, LFHCfS
Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology
Michigan State University
East Lansing, Michigan, USA, USA

?Reputation and the Legibility of Doctors? Handwriting in Situ,? G.A. Cheeseman and N. Boon, Scottish Medical Journal, vol. 46, no. 3, June 2001, pp 79?80. The authors, at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, report:

Our study evaluates if doctors deserve their reputation and investigates how legibility is affected by the time taken to write. Sets of in-patient hospital notes were selected at random. The first written entry by a doctor and a nurse in the current admission were analysed. In addition to this, 10 doctors and 10 nurses, unaware of the true nature of the study, wrote out lists of words and the time taken to do the task was recorded. The doctors? handwriting was significantly less legible and they wrote significantly quicker. However a small minority of the doctors was responsible for the majority of illegible words written by that group.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Hard Looks at Doctors? Handwriting,” published in AIR 14:2.)

Until 1997, lost luggage just sat there, ignored, while scholars focused on other subjects. Then Klaus R Scherer and Grazia Ceschi of the University of Geneva went to an airport and took a hard look at the emotions engendered by luggage loss. They used hidden cameras, microphones and survey forms to record people’s reactions to learning that their luggage was lost.Their report, Lost Luggage - A Field Study of Emotion: Antecedent Appraisal, published in the journal Motivation and Emotion, concerns 110 luggage-deprived passengers. It looks at several questions.

So begins this week?s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

Is it, in some cases, impossible to say what’s impossible? A related question is: Is the unpublishable unpublishable. The latter question is explored, or at least poked at, by the web site Publishing the Unpublishable.

(Thanks to Stephen Direle for bringing this to our attention.)